For someone who took up skating and then hockey (the ice kind, Australians) within the past two years, it was with great pride and reminescence of many a Chapman garbage goal that Amy got her first goal tonight in an all womens’ game.
In Brisbane.
Ronny Chieng may be known to barfbloggers as the Malaysian correspondent on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and his shit is funny.
And the dude knows food.
Kylie Northover of Melbourne’s The Age writes when asked about places to dine in Melbourne (that’s in Australia), Chieng swiftly sent back a small list of his favourite places – and a link, no less, to his own restaurant website.
Less food blog than a comprehensive list of cafes, restaurants and bars, Chieng’s site, I’m OK with Anything, also features his bio, links to buy merchandise and his agent details, but it’s foremost a comprehensive “guide to eating, drinking and playing in Melbourne city”.
“This is right up my alley,” Chieng says when we meet at his first choice, Malaysian cafe Aunty Franklee, in the city. “I’m all about this.”
Chieng loves his food, and when he moved here from Singapore to study law and commerce, he was shocked at the lack of late-night food options. This only got worse when he started comedy. But he’s seen a shift, and says it’s usually the Asian places that have spearheaded later opening hours.
“That then forces other places to start doing it too,” Chieng says. “When you do comedy shows, you usually don’t finish until about 11pm, then you have this adrenaline dump and you get hungry. There’s Supper Club and a couple of places but it used to be you had to settle for one of those shitty Lygon Street places; it’s good they’re open but the food is usually awful. That’s why I started the list.”
Visiting comedians would ask for recommendations and he would send out an email.
“That evolved into the website; now I just send people the link.”
Ronny Chieng
Photo Credit: Comedy Central
His site covers brunch, lunch, dinner, late openings and bars, and while he doesn’t rate restaurants as such, he does differentiate between prices and “moods”, like “fancy but not super fancy”.
“Sometimes you feel like a $15 meal and sometimes you feel like a $30 one.”
Chieng is fussy about his Malaysian food, and Aunty Franklee, inside the Exford Hotel, serves the best char kwai teow, a hawker flat noodle dish, he’s had in Melbourne.
“It’s a dish that I judge all Malaysian restaurants by,” he says. “It’s hard to get this taste outside of Malaysia, and this is the best I’ve had.”
Chieng orders that and the Bak kut teh, a traditional pork rib dish cooked in a fragrant broth made with 23 herbs, for us to share.
Starters are not really a thing in Malaysian cuisine, he says.
“And there’s no rules – it’s very informal,” Chieng says. “You can even use your hands. In fact, I’m probably the best dressed person ever to walk in here.”
Born in Malaysia but raised mostly in Singapore, Chieng moved to Melbourne to study and in one of those almost unbelievable scenarios, decided to try out at an open mic night – despite never having harboured any desire to be a comedian – and found, with his deadpan delivery, he was an instant hit.
Was he always funny?
“I don’t think so,” he says, although that deadpan thing makes it hard to tell. “I gave it a try, just to confirm my suspicions, really.”
That was in 2009, in the final year of his studies – and when he couldn’t get a legal job, he chose comedy. By 2012, he’d won the best newcomer award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and was already touring the major comedy festivals.
And what does his Mum, who, as fans would know, often features in his material, make of his throwing away 10 years of study?
He says she’s “very happy” he got his degrees.
“She’s surprisingly OK – she never once mentioned anything about being part of my stand-up,” he says, again with a tone.
In late 2015, he was headhunted for US comedy news program The Daily Show after host Jon Stewart’s departure. His replacement, comic Trevor Noah, emailed Chieng out of the blue and asked him to come on board as a correspondent. Chieng was on tour at the time, and, as one would, accepted the gig right away.
He didn’t even have time to tell his parents before the news broke in the media.
“I moved straight from the UK to New York – I didn’t even come back to Australia.”
It has been “intense”. “Living in in New York is intense anyway but then with the Trump thing it became even more so,” he says.
On top of the long hours, for many months Chieng was co-writing his sitcom, International Student, via Skype, with Declan Fay in Australia.
“Not to mention I got married last September,” he says.
He married his Australian-Vietnamese fiancee at City Hall in New York, but he’s not getting out of it that easily, with two more “proper” weddings being planned.
“Mum was OK about it but we are getting married again in Melbourne and then again in Kuala Lumpur for my family,” he says. “The Asian wedding is coming!”
He also says no to a beer with lunch, but for less health-conscious reasons.
“The photos will turn out weird if I drink – I have one and my face goes red.”
Much like his character in International Student, one of six comedy pilots shown on ABC last year through its Comedy Showroom initiative, Chieng’s was the first to be made into a full series.
Based “loosely” on his experiences as a student at Melbourne University, it’s a comic look at student life when you’re straddling the cultural divides between locals and foreigners.
It is, Chieng says, an under-explored story.
“It’s all based on stuff that actually happened – I mean, nobody really broke a photocopier, but we had drinking games and I went out of my way to participate in one to get out of my comfort zone,” he says. ” I don’t think you can go through Melbourne Uni without doing a ‘boat race’, for example,” he says of the drinking game in the show’s pilot episode.
When Chieng arrived here, he knew only his sister.
“Usually the international students stick to themselves, but I wanted to make a point of making friends with other students, not just the international ones. I made friends with the locals.”
The series is co-produced by The Comedy Channel in the US, where it will also screen and Chieng reckons despite it being Australian, it will translate to America, where tales of college life are almost their own genre.
As for what lies ahead, Chieng has no definite plan.
“I come from the corporate world where everyone has a five-year plan, but performing arts doesn’t work that way; you just kinda do the best job you can with the gig you’ve got.”
International Student is on ABC, Wednesdays at 9pm, and on ABC iview (that’s the Australian one).
That’s what I told Sara Miller of Live Science in reference to a BBC story on the safety of popular cafe drinks.
The original story Sara was asking about is from a BBC investigation into the safety of ice, iced drinks and coffee shop environments.
Samples of iced drinks from Costa Coffee, Starbucks and Caffe Nero contained varying levels of the bacteria, the BBC’s Watchdog found.
Expert Tony Lewis said the levels found were “concerning”. “These should not be present at any level – never mind the significant numbers found,” he added.
Cleanliness of tables, trays and high chairs at the chains was also tested at 30 branches. Seven out of 10 samples of Costa ice were found to be contaminated with bacteria found in faeces.
What is concerning to the expert? Fecal coliform.
I was introduced to fecal coliform when investigating wash water and vegetables at Ontario (that’s in Canada) greenhouses 15 years ago. We were looking for analytical methods to provide some feedback to producers. We sampled the water for coliform and generic E. coli – and the veggies for generic E. coli and Salmonella. We had initially started looking for coliform and fecal coliform but some smart produce microbiologists suggested the indicator group wasn’t telling folks much.
Or as Mike Doyle and Marilyn Erickson wrote in Microbe in 2006, ‘the fecal coliform assay should at a minimum be redefined to specifically qualify that it is not a reliable indicator of either E. coli or the presence of fecal contamination.’
Makes for good headlines. Doesn’t tell folks anything about risk. Or feces. Might as well sample for covfefe.
Chapman also noted that he’d be more focused on what’s going on in the coffee shops. For example, do employees wash their hands regularly and after handling potentially contaminated foods and products? Do they sanitize the equipment properly? These behaviors could be more indicative of the overall health risks the beverages and foods pose to consumers, he said.
In addition, it’s unclear what type of testing the investigators used for the BBC report. Knowing these methods would provide more useful information, Chapman said. If investigators looked only for bacterial DNA, for example, you wouldn’t know if the bacteria were alive or dead.
“We eat dead bacteria all the time,” he added, referring to the fact that dead bacteria aren’t going to make you sick.
We eat live bacteria all the time – and it doesn’t cause illness. I meant to say we eat dead pathogens all the time.
And if you want poop in your iced coffee, make it from kopi luwak.
Saturday, July 1, 2017, is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding as a nation.
The N.Y. Times says in a series of vignettes, it is a day celebrated by newcomers seeking economic opportunity or refuge from war, immigrants of several generations and descendants of arrivals from more than a hundred years ago. For aboriginal peoples, who remain subjected to discriminatory policies, the anniversary is not one to celebrate.
USA Today reports that Tim Hortons will celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday by offering poutine doughnut at five of its restaurants. A poutine doughnut is one the chain’s Honey Dip Donuts topped with potato wedges, gravy and cheese curds.
And TMZ reports Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posed for the cover of Delta Airlines Sky Mag … the July issue. The shot is perfectly framed … making his crotch the centerpiece.
This is the tragedy that Canada has become: A hot leader with the media sense and policy sense of a moose, by posing for Delta.
No one flies Delta, unless they have to.
I tried not to post this, but it brought back so many happy memories of watching SCTV in Canada as a teenager, and the awesome manscaping of Salvador Dali.
The food safety hook would be the Salmonella cross-contamination with the eggs.
AP reports a Spanish judge has ordered the remains of artist Salvador Dali be exhumed to settle a paternity suit, despite opposition from the state-run foundation that manages the artist’s estate.
Dali, considered one of the fathers of surrealist art, died in 1989 and is buried in his museum in the northeast town of Figueres.
Pilar Abel, a tarot-card reader from the nearby city of Girona who was born in 1956, says she is the offspring of an affair between Dali and her mother, Antonia.
At the time of the alleged affair, Dali was married to his muse, Gala, who died seven years before the painter. Gala had a daughter from an earlier marriage but the couple had no children of their own. Upon his death, at age 84, Dali bestowed his estate to the Spanish state.
On Monday, a Madrid court statement said that tests with DNA from Dali’s embalmed body were necessary because there were no other existing biological remains with which to make a genetic comparison.
Linda Silmalis of the Courier Mail writes it has been dubbed Barf-gate — who chundered in a ministerial car, leaving the driver gagging and resulting in a clean-up bill costing hundreds of dollars?
The car was driven by a ministerial driver who transported NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro and Liberal MP Eleni Petinos (right, with Blues coach) from ANZ Stadium, where they had been watching the State of Origin match on Wednesday night.
The pair had watched the game with Mr Barilaro’s young daughter and one of his staffers.
Mr Barilaro was in a celebratory mode after a successful state Budget, tweeting from the game: “I spent today backing #NSW in small business AND State of #Origin! UP THE BLUES!!!!!”
By Friday, word was going around Parliament House of a driver fuming over what he had discovered in the car upon starting his shift hours — possible a day — later.
“The word is one vomited, and that set off the others,” a source close to the driver said.
Mr Barilaro, a married father of two, declined to answer any questions about the cost of the clean-up bill, nor who left the car in a mess.
A statement from his office confirmed Mr Barilaro and Ms Petinos were at Origin, but declined to confirm the figure to be repaid.
“The taxpayer will not have to bear any costs,” the statement said.
“Costs incurred will be privately managed.”
I go to therapy every Friday.
It’s a commitment, and I like the people, who are like the group session on the original Bob Newhart show.
But I can’t help thinking of this when I’m there.
Unable to contain his nausea at the horrifying scene before him, rookie USDA agent Michael Dunn vomited Friday after seeing his first rotten orange.
“As soon as the kid caught a glimpse of that produce lying there decomposing, he turned away, hunched over, and started throwing up like crazy,” said supervisor Carl Webster, adding that it was not uncommon for brand-new agents to react in such a manner when suddenly confronted with a putrefying, fly-covered rind. “He’ll get past it, though—you build up your tolerance after a while. The key is to not let it faze you but also never forget that this rotting pulp was once a sweet, delicious part of someone’s fruit bowl or lunchbox.”
At press time, Dunn had steeled himself and looked at the orange once more, but was vomiting again before he could make it back to the car.
As a former occupant of jail and a budding microbiologist, I know that booze can be made from anything that contains sugar or their carbohydrate predecessors.
According to Australian Food News, two Australian women on a mission to reduce food waste have launched a new vodka made using carrots.
The pair behind the drink, Gen Windley and Alice Gorman, came up with the idea knowing that carrots grown by their husbands were going to waste when they did not meet supermarket cosmetic standards.
Wanting to stop waste, the women joined with a wine maker, Jason Hannary of Flinders Park Winery, to create a vodka made from carrots.
The resulting drink has been described as a clear, slightly-sweet vodka that has a subtle hint of carrot.
“Not having done anything with vegetables before was a bit daunting, but after a few experiments we got a great result,” said distiller Jason Hannary.
It is not the first time the women and their families have found unique ways to use leftover carrots from their farms. In 2015, one of the women’s husband created carrot beer sold at a Queensland brewery.
“Alice and I have four loud and energetic sons so we decided this was the year to create an alcoholic vegetable drink for ourselves!” Gen Windley said.
Carrot Vodka will be launched at the Winter Harvest Festival which is part of the Scenic Rim Eat Local Week. The week is dedicated to promoting food and wine from the Scenic Rim region in South East Queensland.
It’s lazy to poke holes in the wellness industry.
So here’s to fun and laziness.
Dr. Kellogg has been an easy target for two centuries, other shamen and woman date back to antiquity, when who knew why anyone had explosive diahhrea, other than the ether or the gods.
Anyone who likes Coldplay enough to marry the singer has serious problems, and should not be dispensing advice for anyone.
Andrea Mandell of USA Today reports Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, tested its first summit in the gluten-free city of Los Angeles last Saturday. The price was steep: Roughly 600 attendees paid anywhere from $500 (for a “Lapis” pass) to $1,500 (for a “Clear Quartz” pass) to experience all things Goop for over nine hours. From crystal therapy to organic bone broth sampling, here’s how our experience went down at Paltrow’s first conference.
8:45 a.m. This is technically the time I’m allowed into “Goop hall,” where I’ve been promised a long list of vendors showcasing goods for me to try. But I’m still at home, trying to figure out if the dress code will be more athleisure or free-spirited sundress. The first session doesn’t start until 10 a.m., so what’s the harm in arriving a tad late?
9:30 a.m. Huge mistake. After being given my entry pass for the day – a bracelet of brown worry beads with a blue tassel, signifying my lowest-tier status (Lapis), I enter Goop hall and it is immediately epic. There’s a woman giving crystal therapy readings seated on cushions, the line for aura photography (a thing!) is 25 people deep, the flavored oxygen bar is packed and Dyson blowouts are in full swing.
9:35 a.m. Mildly panicked, I quickly get to breakfast, sampling in quick succession: Bulletproof Coffee Plus (coffee blended with something called Brain Octane Oil, grass-fed Butter and pasture-raised collagen protein), a tiny pink glazed donut from Erin McKenna’s Bakery and a sushi-inspired breakfast lox burrito from Kye’s.
9:40 a.m. I spot Gwyneth Paltrow walking in and hugging her staff as she takes in the peak Goopdom. (She wore a pink sundress, and I feel vindicated, but in truth anything went, as the dress code varied from athleisure to jeans.) The crowd here is mostly female, white, and between the ages of 30-50.
10 a.m. We assemble into the “chat room,” a forum style hall in which Blythe Danner’s pre-recorded voice welcomes us over the PA. Paltrow takes the blush-tone stage to greet us and explains how she became interested in this space in 1999, after her father was diagnosed with throat cancer. “I was trying to get him to eat healthier and I made him this batch of zucchini bread that was everything-free and I thought it was delicious,” she says. “And he bit into it and went, ‘Well, it’s like biting into The New York Times’.” As the audience chuckles, she says luckily gluten-free sugar-free food “has made a lot of progress since the ’90s.”
10:15 a.m.. Paltrow introduces us to the “the guy responsible for the term conscious uncoupling,” Dr. Habib Sadeghi, who will be instructing us on something called Cosmic Flow. But it’s a rough start: Sadeghi’s hour-long session proves to be a puzzling, extemporaneous jumble of his battle with testicular cancer, “the ontological experience called your life,” queries on why water is wet and how birds know how to fly (my 8-year-old could deliver this talk; get out there and earn your keep). He reads thank you notes from his patients and holds an existential discussion on how we chew our lunch. “I am one of the most authentic beings you will ever meet!” says Sadeghi, which immediately makes me question whether he is authentic. “Because I will never sell you short.” Somewhat deflated, I await the next session on gut health.
I’ve always told my daughters, when someone says “trust me,” run away.
11:35 a.m. Dr. Alejandro Junger (known for his Paltrow-approved master cleanses) takes the stage with Dr. Steven Gundry and Dr. Amy Myers. I know nothing about gut health, so I’m here for this: Teach me about my gut! But the first 10 minutes meander so much I get antsy and sneak out to try more of the samplings in Goop hall. There goes my gut.
11:45 a.m. Living the high life, I try Belcampo’s organic bone broth (unsalted, it’s hospital-like, but becomes more appetizing once you stir in offered mix-ins like apple cider vinegar and honey), before moving onto Moon Juice’s Blue Tonic with Brain Dust. There’s also a progressive display of pre-filled vape pens from hmbldt and an area called The Pharmacy, where you can buy Paltrow’s pre-packaged vitamins ($90).
12:05 p.m. Scooting back into gut health, it seems I’ve missed Gundry advising the audience to go hungry: “Don’t eat. I can’t stress that enough. We have the ability to store fat,” he instructed, according to my colleague at the Los Angeles Times.
12:15 p.m. Break! Though all of the activities available in the courtyard booked up for the day by 10 a.m. (an annoyance to many who paid hundreds if not thousands to be here) I luck out and get my aura photographed (a purple-y red, as it turns out, signifying I’m both a “visionary” and “passionate”). I sample “kale cookies ‘n cream” vegan ice cream. (Pass.) Two women I run into from Kansas City have told me they’re not super into the panels so far, and might try a nearby hike.
12:35 p.m. Onto a psychotherapy panel called The Tools! Paltrow moderates this one herself, and the session features her go-to doctors, Dr. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. Initially, I’m worried they’re going to espouse more why-do-birds-fly generalities, but suddenly a red-headed woman volunteers to go up on stage for a session of LIVE THERAPY. (Paltrow gives up her seat and sits cross-legged on the floor.) It’s a remarkably raw, honest 30 minutes and closes with a talk about positive entitlement. “60 to 80 percent of the women in my practice don’t feel that basic sense of entitlement, that ‘I deserve this,’ ” says Michels. At their prompting, the room of women shout, “I’m an animal!” The hour ends with Paltrow opening up about her struggle with perfectionism. The doctors coin our fear The Shadow. “It’s whatever you wish you weren’t,” says Michels, no matter how much success you have.
1:15 pm Lunch is a yogi’s dream: Kale salads from Sweetgreen, poke bowls from Sweetfin, the matcha bar in full swing. Paltrow is off in an enclosed garden space having a catered meal with those who shelled out $1,500. This is not me, but I’m cool, I get to watch people willingly submit themselves to electrolyte IV drips in the courtyard.
3:45 p.m. The sex panel! Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more advice, renowned relationship expert Esther Perel (whose podcast I will now subscribe to), takes the stage with Girls showrunner Jenni Konner and “orgasmic genius” Nicole Daedone. Konner explains she and Lena Dunham depicted mostly bad sex on Girls because “we showed what sex is like in your twenties.” Perel disputes the common belief that women have lower libidos than men. “I don’t think women don’t want sex, I think women don’t want the sex they have,” she says. The session gets the biggest applause of the day.
5:05 p.m. Cute servers circle the chat room with trays of refreshing fruit smoothies. I’m starting to think Paltrow is a genius.
5:15 p.m. After a brief Q&A with Tracy Anderson, we’re onto the celebrity-packed keynote panel called Balls in the Air, which features Cameron Diaz, Tory Burch, Nicole Richie and Miranda Kerr, with Paltrow moderating. The convo is focused not on how these successful, beautiful women do it all, but how they choose what not to do. Diaz reveals why she hasn’t made a movie in over three years.
After being on the road continuously for her film career, “I just went, ‘I can’t really say who I am, to myself. Which is a hard thing to face up to,” says the actress, who married Benji Madden in 2015. “I can’t do the same things I’ve been doing for two decades…if I want to have a full life.” Richie’s tip on how she stays sane? “I like to wake up an hour before my kids, just so I can be alone.” The session ends on a classically Goop note, with Kerr revealing she once tried leech facials, and brought the leeches home because they kill them otherwise. “They’re in my koi pod,” she says.